Relationships need to be nurtured from both the sides, otherwise it is not a relationship but a sacrifice. And sacrifice of this kind, done out of blind attachment does no good to either the giver or the receiver. It increases obscurity in both as it is tamasic in nature, sapping out the giver and pauperising the receiver since he stops making effort. This at least is the teaching of the Gita and it holds good always in real time human experience. Here are some luminous words of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to help us understand.
“Help men, but do not pauperise them of their energy; lead and instruct men, but see that their initiative and originally remain intact; take others into thyself, but give them in return the full godhead of their nature. He who can do this is the leader and the guru.”
“God has made the world a field of battle and filled it with the trampling of combatants and the cries of a great wrestle and struggle. Would you filch His peace without paying the price He has fixed for it?”
The Mother adds her comments to the above two aphorism widening their scope.
‘All that Sri Aurobindo says here is aimed at fighting against human nature with its inertia, its heaviness, laziness, easy satisfactions, hostility to all effort. How many times in life does one meet people who become pacifists because they are afraid to fight, who long for rest before they have earned it, who are satisfied with a little progress and in their imagination and desires make it into a marvellous realisation so as to justify their stopping half-way.
In ordinary life, already, this happens so much. Indeed, this is the bourgeois ideal, which has deadened mankind and made man into what he is now: “Work while you are young, accumulate wealth, honour, position; be provident, have a little foresight, put something by, lay up a capital, become an official—so that later when you are forty you “can sit down”, enjoy your income and later your pension and, as they say, enjoy a well-earned rest.”—To sit down, to stop on the way, not to move forward, to go to sleep, to go downhill towards the grave before one’s time, cease to live the purpose of life—to sit down!
The minute one stops going forward, one falls back. The moment one is satisfied and no longer aspires, one begins to die. Life is movement, it is effort, it is a march forward, the scaling of a mountain, the climb towards new revelations, towards future realisations. Nothing is more dangerous than wanting to rest. It is in action, in effort, in the march forward that repose must be found, the true repose of complete trust in the divine Grace, of the absence of desires, of victory over egoism.
True repose comes from the widening, the universalisation of the consciousness. Become as vast as the world and you will always be at rest. In the thick of action, in the very midst of the battle, the effort, you will know the repose of infinity and eternity.’
Affectionately,
Alok Da
